Prepping some mix CDs for the drive my sister and I will take in Colorado and Wyoming next week for Thanksgiving, I conversed by email with a coworker about mixtape1 gimmicks, such as having songs on a travel mix focus on driving, typically via an allusion in the song’s title. The robots at Tiny Mix Tapes have been churning out mixtapes like these for years.
My coworker countered with a still gimmicky but more clever idea for a work-in-progress mix that’s perfect for the music lover, and specifically, the album lover. There are three criteria each song on this mixtape must meet:
- The lyrics of the song must contain the exact name of the album it originally appeared on.
- The song’s name may not share the album’s name.
- The song “obv. must be good.”
Got it? You’ll note that rule two disqualifies many songs. For example, “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere” by Neil Young with Crazy Horse won’t work. Although it contains the exact lyric “everybody knows this is nowhere,” the album on which the song originally appears is titled Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
An example of an acceptable song would be Elvis Costello’s “Alison” because it contains the lyric “my aim is true,” which is the name of the album “Alison” appears on. Another would be Modest Mouse’s “Bury Me With It,” which contains the lyric “good news for people who love bad news” and appears on the album of that same lengthy name.
Genius, especially because, unless there’s a site listing such songs that I haven’t found, it’s nearly impossible to cheat with Google. Or at the least, it would be time consuming; most song-lyric sites bristle with pop-up ads and devote separate pages to each song on an album. No, for this game you must have knowledge of often obscure album tracks. The only three I could think of at work today are from albums I listened to a lot in high school and college:
- “Oh My Golly!” by the Pixies, from the album Surfer Rosa
- “Cannonball” by the Breeders, from the album Last Splash
- “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, from the album Nevermind
Now go check your record collection and suss out more songs that fit the bill.
1 I know they’re all digital or CDs now and I don’t care. “Mixtape” sounds better. [back]